Mandy Barker

 

Covid finally got me and I have been floored by it so sorry for a scant week on the art room. 

Before I got ill, I was having a wonderful time helping to put together the exhibition 'Our Plastic Ocean' by Mandy Barker which opens tomorrow in Dunfermline Museum and Gallery and runs until the 11th of June.  Mandy's photographs of ocean plastics are reminiscent for me of space litter scattered as they are on the infinite blackness.  

If you are near by please come and see the exhibition it is quite amazing, horrifying and inspiring and there are some wonderful events to support it. 

Julia Barton and Littoral

It is amazing when you find a connection with someone new, a shared passion. This happened this weekend at the Fruitmarket Gallery with Julia Barton of Littoral Art an artist with a passion for seaweed, who has increasingly been distracted and distraught with the amount of plastic pollution. 

So rarely was Julia finding plastic free specimens that she started drawing the plastic into her seaweed studies you can see some of these in her books above. It needs to be said that Julia was not working on a densely populated metropolitan coast but on the remote archipelago of the Shetland Isles. 

People do not realise the impact that their actions and the plastics that they use are having and paramount to Julia's practice is to educate people about the devastation that plastic is having on our environment and ultimately our lives. 

You can get follow Julia's work and get your guide to beach litter here.

The Most Dangerous Species by Klas Ernflo

This is just the most fantastic campaign against pollution and littering. I have admired it for a long time. The shopping trolleys reminded me of it because they are the most prolific inhabitants of the estuary here. Klas Ernflo is an illustrator and graphic artist of great ingenuity and style. This poster was commissioned by the Government of Catalunya to raise environmental awareness and keep the Mediterranean clean.